I’ve recently taken possession of a very tidy Omega Speedmaster Professional otherwise known as the ‘Moon Watch’. During my usual inspection of the movement, my typically dour disposition was sowewhat lifted by the revelation that the manufacture date was the same year as my birthday, 1970. The date also has rather more important significance to mankind in that, while I was being ushered into the world, Jack Swigert, Jim Lovell and Fred Haise were fighting for survival during their ill-fated excursion to the moon. The history books state that the Speedmaster was used to time the critical course correction ‘burn’ to send them back to earth, although much hay has been made by conspiracists, fuelled notably from a misconstrued quote from “The Best of Times: Rolex, an unauthorized History“, (Dowling and Hess) leading many to believe (mostly Rolex officionados) that Jack Swigert’s Rolex GMT was used for the task. Chuck Maddox wrote a great essay on the subject which was certainly enough to convince me of the true facts surrounding the event. The internet is an amazing place but where a million voices have replaced one, it becomes rather more dificult to discern the truth from fiction. Scarily, there are still people out there making a living from attempting to convince the world that we never went to the moon at all, let alone the anal rumblings over which watch was used at the time.
The story of how the watch was selected for the space programme and how it eventually came to be the ‘first watch worn on the moon’ during the Apollo 12 moon landing is just as fascinating. As a company director of a small water engineering consultancy, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with the astonishingly bureaucratic and slow procurement processes most large organisations employ in buying new goods and services. I’m sure you would expect a government organisation like NASA to undertake the highest standards of evaluation, re-evaluation and other mind-bendingly protracted quality system processes to seeking a supplier for a watch for their space missions. Not so, in fact NASA back in 1961, realising that they were running short of time in the race for space, sent a buyer for flight equipment, incognito, to ‘Corrigan’s’ watch shop in Houston, Texas to purchase five chronographs for testing purposes, all of different brands including the Omega Speedmaster. The Speedmaster has been in production since 1957. It was never designed or modified by NASA (contrary to some folklore) and in fact, Omega were completely unaware of NASA’s intended use of the watch until much later.
NASA’s engineers subjected the watches to various ’torture’ tests in order to simulate the conditions found in space. Exposure to extreme heat, cooling, vibration and vacuum were all evaluated with the result being that only the Omega Speedmaster passed all the tests. This lead to the watch being ‘Flight Qualified’ and it’s eventual use on the moon. In a slight twist of fate, it wasn’t actually my namesake, Neil Armstrong’s Speedmaster that first landed on the moon. A problem had developed with the lunar craft’s timer which resulted in Armstrong’s ’Speedy’ being used as a backup device. It wasn’t until Buzz Aldrin stepped on to the surface that the Speedmaster’s glory was sealed.
The Speedmaster continued to support the space programme for many years, with no revision other than to have the moniker ‘Professional’ added by Omega following it’s NASA endorsement. It was even adopted by Russia’s cosmonauts and also fought off some very aggressive political lobbying to have ‘All American’ products (notably Bulova) supporting the space programme. Post ‘69 models celebrated the lunar landing event with the caseback being inscribed ‘The first Watch worn on the moon’. Omega extended their claim further later on to say ‘the First and ONLY watch worn on the moon’. This statement was however proved incorrect when Apollo XV Astronaut David Scott testified to wearing a Waltham chronograph on the moon when the crystal of his Omega had ‘popped off’.
So the next time you find yourself in charge of a procurement project, just check your local supplier doesn’t have what you are looking for, in stock before spending millions reinventing the wheel!
As for my new Speedy, I doubt it will be asked to provide service in no more pressing an environment than the office, where temperatures can readily vary between an extreme 15 and 20deg C, and the only risk of serious impact is from me banging my fists on the table in frustration at those bureaucratic company buyers.
